Retired Air Force colonel: 2 UFOs crashed at Roswell in '47

Roswell
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A retired US Air Force colonel who was in New Mexico at the time of the infamous 1947 Roswell incident claims that two unidentified flying objects crashed in the desert.

Retired Lt. Col. Richard French, who had for many years denied the existence of any Roswell UFO, told the Huffington Post that "there were actually two crashes at Roswell."

"The first one was shot down by an experimental US airplane that was flying out of White Sands... and it shot what was effectively an electronic pulse-type weapon that disabled and took away all the controls of the UFO, and that's why it crashed."

"When they hit it with that electromagnetic pulse-- bingo!-- there goes all their electronics and, consequently, the UFO was uncontrollable," he added.

French, who was an Air Force pilot at the time and who later flew combat missions in the Korean War and in Southeast Asia before working for military intelligence, says he was told about the alleged UFO shoot-downs by another military officer who informed him that a second UFO crashed near Roswell a few days later.

"It was within a few miles of where the original crash was," he said. "We think that the reason they were in there... was to try and recover parts and any survivors of the first crash. I'm [referring to] the people from outer space-- the guys whose UFO it was."

French also says he saw photos of debris from the crashed UFO.

"[It] had inscriptions on it that looked like it was in an Arabic language-- it was like a part number on each one of them. They were photographs from a folder that I just thumbed through," he claimed.

Recently, retired CIA agent Chase Brandon claimed to have seen files containing photos and material confirming that a UFO piloted by space aliens had crashed at Roswell.

What's interesting about Lt. Col. French's 'admission' is that for many years, he denied the existence of UFOs. In fact, French worked as an investigator on Project Blue Book, the Air Force's 22-year study of unidentified flying objects.

Blue Book found "no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles."

But French claims he was ordered to debunk UFO sightings.

"If someone had a UFO sighting, I and another agent would try to come up with some logical explanation for this strange aerial appearance," he told the Huffington Post. "We gave our analysis and tried to debunk [sightings] by saying it was swamp fog or that the thing they saw was actually hanging on wires."

French claims the cover-up went "all the way to the presidential level."

Asked why the military and government would conceal the existence of UFOs, French replied:

"They never give you an explanation, but I'll tell you what my analysis of it is: If they accepted the fact that there are creatures coming to earth from other universes or wherever, it basically would destroy religions, and the fact that our military's helpless against them would destroy the reputation of the military. You're talking about military, national defense and religious reasons."

Retired Army Colonel John Alexander, who believes that UFOs are real, told the Huffington Post that Col. French's story does not add up.

"No chance! Zero chance!" he said, citing his own work with pulse-type weapons and access to top-secret UFO files in the 1980s.

"In the 1980s, I was the guy developing all the pulse-power weapons systems," Alexander said, adding that it was impossible for the type of technology French claims brought down a UFO to exist in the 1940s.

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field public information officer Walter Haut announced that the military had captured a "crashed flying disk." The local paper, the Roswell Daily Record, reported this story on its front page. But the very next day, Eighth Air Force commander Gen. Roger Ramey said that what had really been recovered was a downed weather balloon.

Multiple government investigations concluded that the material recovered near Roswell came from a balloon that was part of Project Mogul, a secret government program in which high-altitude balloons were used to monitor sound waves emanating from potential Soviet atomic bomb testing.